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As Facebook Buys Oculus, Is A Virtual Reality Social Network In Our Future?

It’s hard to imagine the last time a tech news item was met with such unbridled…confusion. Yesterday, Facebook announced they were buying Oculus, creator of the Kickstarted Oculus Rift, for $2 billion. While GoogleGoogle or MicrosoftMicrosoft making the same purchase might have made some degree of sense, many can’t fathom why exactly Facebook would be buying a company about to release a VR gaming device in the near future.

Even though the Oculus isn’t on store shelves yet, I think it’s time for gaming enthusiasts to admit that when VR does arrive on the scene, it’s going to have applications far beyond games. In the announcement, Mark Zuckerberg lists a few of those.

“After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

“This is really a new communication platform,” he continues. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”

I think people may be missing Facebook’s long game here. No, it doesn’t make a terribly large amount of sense for Facebook to want to invest in VR games, as engaging as virtual reality Farmville may be. After all, they’re a social network. A website. But will something so archaic still about around ten years from now? How about 20?

Rather, I think Facebook may be testing the waters for something even more science fiction than VR games here. I think they believe they can someday build the world’s first VR social network.

After all, a teacher seeing a classroom of students and vice versa through VR is just virtual people in a virtual room. So is a patient consulting with a doctor.

But who’s to say that the teacher has to look like the real-life version of the teacher? That the doctor has to look like the doctor? This is virtual reality after all. Why can’t your teacher be a virtual avatar of Mr. Feeney from Boy Meets World? Why can’t your doctor be a digital Meredith Grey? For that matter, why can’t they be a dragon or a robot or a Viking? And why do they have to be teaching or giving medical advice? Why can’t you all just be hanging out as avatars in a digital world?

And there we go. A few hop, skips, jumps and a VR social network is born. Obviously the process is a lot more technically complex than that, but you get the idea.

The concept has been seen many, many times through all of science fiction, and I’ll leave it to someone like io9 to run down the ten best VR universes in literature, but a few examples come to mind. One is The Oasis from Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. In that book, the Oasis is essentially an MMORPG that has taken over every facet of real life. There’s still questing and dungeons and so on, but it’s also a virtual parallel existence. Another would be the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a virtual plane where everyone picks their own avatars, and the system is patrolled by software daemons as well as real people. These universes essentially become society, and at the very least, they fully replace ancient tech like the internet.

All of a sudden, none of this seems as far-fetched as it used to. All of these universes involve some version of the Oculus. A device strapped to a person trapping their sensory inputs in a digital realm. If Mark Zuckerberg is telling me I can talk to virtual teachers and doctors and have adventures and experiences with my friends through his vision of the Oculus, I have to imagine that in the back of his mind, he has something like a true VR social network in mind. Maybe a “social network” is even too restrictive a term. Maybe it will someday just be an entirely digital world.

Naturally, anything approaching that level of widespread adoption and immersion is a long ways off, but VR technology is evolving incredibly quickly. The Oculus Rift itself went from a Kickstarter asking for $250,000, to an actual device raising $90M in funding with the fantastically functional Crystal Cove, to now being sold for $2B to one of the biggest tech companies on the planet. This has all happened in less than two years, which is why thinking ten or 20 years into the future is important when it comes to this technology.

I suppose there’s still some chance that this all dissolves. That people hate VR or the tech industry gets bored with it and it doesn’t catch on. My prediction of a VR world in 20 years could be the equivalent of someone saying during the space race that there will be a fully functional city on the moon in the year 2000.

But I don’t think so. I don’t think VR will be a fad when it arrives. I believe it has the ability to fundamentally change not just gaming, but the world. Really, by possibly making the world into some form of a massive digital game. Whether VR does this with Facebook’s money or someone else’s, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t believe Facebook bought the Oculus to beam news feed ads into people’s retinas the way many are saying. They’re smarter than that, and they likely have much larger plans than you can imagine.

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